The use of droplets or particles of an active substance incorporated in a carrier or carrier composition is well known in various arts including pharmaceutical, medical, agricultural, and many others. Typically, specific compositions provide for the application of specific active substances in a quantity or concentration appropriate to the use, and are particularly well suited to cases where the active substance itself is not easily compounded into a suitable vehicle or to facilitate controlled release of the active substance.
Among known encapsulation compositions and methods are those based on the formation of capsular walls by the reaction of a Lewis acid and a Lewis base, aligned at a droplet interface in an emulsified two-phase (generally aqueous-organic solvent) mixture, with a core material trapped in the droplet to be encapsulated. A number of such compositions and methods, and variants thereof, are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,950,457, 4,743,583, 4,797,234, 4,917,892, 5,093,198, 5,132,117, 5,284,663, 5,490,986, 5,686,113, 6,270,800, and 6,531,156, in which Dr. Tully Speaker is the inventor or a co-inventor and in some of which the present inventor is a co-inventor, and in U.S. Pat. No. 8,039,015, by one of the present inventors, Tycho Speaker. The Lewis acid/Lewis base reactions described in the above cited patents involve at least one ionic polymeric material, and may be described as a complexation of that material with at least one ionic component of opposite charge to form an ionic salt product. It is convenient to refer to microcapsules formed by the methods described in the Speaker patents as “charged polymer complex” microcapsules.
A plethora of other microcapsule types and compositions are known in the art, and the cited Speaker patents above describe numerous advantages in regard to the convenience of manufacture and other characteristics of the charged polymer complexes described therein. Published PCT application WO 2012/138696 teaches use of cationic polymers in a shampoo, to enhance deposition of negatively charged polyacrylate microcapsules onto hair. However, prior art does not describe compositions that exploit the properties of the charged polymer complex microcapsules described in the cited Speaker patents. Thus there is a lack of available compositions that exploit the useful qualities of the charged polymer complex encapsulated product and also provide for a means of use that realize these benefits.